Film Review: The Social Dilemma

Ten or so years into the mass zombification of humanity through smart phones, someone in the upper suite of the control matrix has decided to release a bunch of lapsed true-believer engineers in the great experiment to confess to the black Netflix screen, like disillusioned priests at the unspeakable corruption in their blessed vehicle, the alienation this attempt to connect humanity has wrought. This staged confession has in turn given the gazillions of people who have watched the documentary permission to face the obvious: They have been imprisoned by the very devices that were supposed to free them. 

OK maybe that’s a stretch. They are given permission to wring their hands about the suicide rate of Gen Z girls, the collapsing consensus between what is real and fake, the reality that the reality presented by their device (including Netflix) is unique to them and their buying preferences, and, oh yeah, that violent white supremacists have been given free reign to terrorize America because of the unrestrained profit motive powering Big Tech. 

Hold up. What was that last point? Yes, it seems the end results of all this social media excess are unrestrained gangs of racist brown shirts, as shown in the film’s interspersed dramatization, where a hapless teen’s need for peer approval inevitably leads to him joining a mob seemingly intent on putting black people on crosses and lynching them. They bring home this grisly reality with images from my home town of Huntington Beach as an example of this social-media inspired violence breaking out between right and left. 

The only problem is that the two images they choose to make this point – as I am well aware since I witnessed them happen – show nothing of the sort. One is of 5-time World Wresting Federation Champion (and now Huntington Beach City Councilman) Tito Ortiz blocking the way of a bunch of paid Antifa ruffians, who were trying to invade one of a series of peaceful protests against the state’s lockdown policies with a vow to “burn the city down.” It was a citizen trying to prevent a crime – not violent at all. The police were right there, many on horses, standing by. The protests included all sides, all of whom – mask-wearing and flag-bearing – respected each other and their right to speak. There were skateboards, soft serve, drum circles. It was a festive day at the beach. Why would a film intent on showing how deceptive social media can be take such a risk to blatantly misrepresent what actually happened? 

The second shot from my home town offers a clue. It was of a woman planting an American flag on the beach before being accosted by police. The film again made it look like a violent clash when it was actually a beautiful and iconic cry for liberty, someone bravely reminding us of our constitutional rights before she was physically removed because Governor Newsom decided on a whim that no one was allowed to go on the beach. In reality, the shot changed things, beaches opened, people’s eyes opened to the reality of a totalitarian state that they said could never happen here. 

What in heaven’s name is going on? How could a movie that started so promisingly, full of cool diagnostic terms like “snapchat dysmorphia,” “positive intermittent reinforcement,” “growth hacking,” “psychometric dopplegangers,” and “the attention extraction model” go so dismally wrong? Why reinforce the interpersonal void that anyone parenting a Gen Z child grieves every day –  a generation that has the unusual habit of turning their phone around to film anyone who confronts them in an unpleasant way – only to turn its psychic energy into railing against Russians hacking elections, flat earthers, anti-vaxxers, “pizzagate” believers and the aforementioned white supremacists? 

The short answer – and it pervades every frame of the movie – is that they know they’ve lost the war. 

The film reminded me of a similar doom-laden documentary from about a decade ago called The Corporation. One left that happy flick with the idea that Monsanto was on the verge of poisoning the world’s food supply and we are collectively powerless to stop it. It didn’t quite turn out that way, for similar reasons that technology won’t take away the last vestige of our collective will. One indication of this is that FCC Section 230, which protects the internet giants from libel laws on the condition they make no editorial decisions, was not even mentioned once in the entire documentary, even when they were waxing poetic about rule changes, regulations and taxes to rein in Big Tech. 

It’s no great secret anymore that the giant social media companies routinely game their algorithms to highlight approved and bury non-approved content, they shadow ban so that the poster doesn’t see that no one else can see their post, they “fact-check” and label “false” anything that veers from their official approved narrative, and they even demonetize and delete independent thinking accounts that have done nothing wrong, with no warning and for no stated or discernible reason except that they’ve attracted a large audience. With these knowing violations of the terms of their FCC charter, indefensible under any standard of free speech I’ve ever been taught, they have put not only their legal freedom but their very existence at risk, going so perversely against their so-called profit motive that all they can do now is double down with other conspirators to censor anything that will keep their autocratic control in place, even if they have to, say, brazenly support the current massive electoral fraud that will turn out to be the biggest crime in US history.  

Could it be someone is letting this all happen, waiting for big tech and big media to overreach, to the point where people rise up and demand a change? On the ground, it looks like we are rapidly reaching that point. The film's over-the-top propaganda, and Big Tech's panicked actions suggest they are in a lot more trouble than the public at large realizes. 

During the last few decades, but especially in the last four years or so, arcane and unspeakable secrets held back for thousands of years have come out into the open, as millions and millions of people realize that the world we live in is largely a controlled illusion that we are free to transcend at any time. It’s called the Great Awakening, and it is a truly special time in history, one that I and countless others feel truly blessed to live in. We want to go shouting from the rafters the good news about the unimagined possibilities that are in our not-too-distant future.

The challenge we have is that the media – social and traditional – is absolutely at war with this awakening, because they can’t control it. They seek to subvert, censor, ridicule and squash non-approved thought by ANY means necessary, because their biggest fear is an awakened populace. 

This civil war, an information war for the minds of the populace, is ongoing and has been for years. There are two distinct sides, secretive though they both are, and they each have distinct strategies. Let’s just call these sides the Alliance and the Hive. The Hive has long held power, by controlling governments, banks, churches, foundations, academia, media etc. in an elaborate system of reward and punishment – power and money on the one hand, blackmail for compelled unspeakable crimes to enforce loyalty on the other. The Alliance has been consistently outmaneuvered for decades – maybe even centuries – but it came into possession of the blackmail files (electronically of course), has infiltrated Hive communications, and found enough support within the Hive-controlled institutions to put one of their own into a dominant position of power. 

This was the first genuine threat to Hive control as far as anyone can remember, and it triggered an aggressive strategy to remove this usurper from power by any means at their disposal. The Alliance, having the “black position” in chess, responded by setting traps using their ability to know the enemy’s moves, and allowing them to walk in the front door only to be ambushed. Classic guerrilla tactics, in other words. While this strategy bought them time, they used their blackmail files to either free, take out or control key players across all Hive-controlled institutions, enough at this point to shift the levers of power definitively in their direction. 

The key to the ongoing Alliance plan is their strength in numbers. The Hive, despite its vast size, is rigidly hierarchical and controlled by very few people, and its processes are developed to project its power through largely illusory means. If this illusion can be broken, the people informed that they have been deceived, the Alliance can release the technology and money that has been withheld in the name of power for a long time. This is all going on behind the scenes, but some of us can see the shadow patterns on the cave wall, mostly because the Alliance has started communicating with us directly. This is very difficult, since all areas of media are controlled by the Hive, but the strategy has resulted in the already-awakened people to bond together and help others awaken. At each point of awakening though, lies the Hive, with its communication engines and control over the population’s minds through a dizzying array of propaganda techniques and mind-controlling technologies. Thus those aligned with the Alliance are acutely aware of the war. Most of the human population is not, because they are under the mind-enslavement of the Hive. But day by day, as the pillars of Hive support collapse, the Alliance gains ground.

And that’s why it’s all going to come crashing down on the Big Tech octopuses as it is coming down on the earlier, unassailable Monsanto. They could not figure out a solution to the genie they let out of the bottle, an informed populace who think for themselves and share information with others in an open forum. They really thought they could target, geotag, shadow ban and censor the fringe of free thinkers, but every day more people are waking up to the fact that they have lied to and gaslit for a very long time, and they are determined to never let it happen again. 

Vignette from the Civil War

I have to leave her a crumb

     Sez Thunder Tongue

But censorious birds

     Won't take my words

So why am I still

     So polite?

Civility means more,

     They say, in a war,

To allow me to bow 

     While you rationalize

The impossibility of democracy, 

     Forfeit the present to history.

Each person makes a choice

     With their voice

To stand with the beautiful 

     And true 

Or let certainty salve

     Their confusion.

The war is inside

     Each one of us

Although it seems

     In moments

To encroach

     Upon the lawn.

Afternoon on Misery

The concrete never lies. There were once hotels
And people here, caught up in these vines.
The tell-tale posts for summer docks
Are not disguised enough by seaweed
To free themselves from the past.
                                                              Yet we know
Only that these people had the same presumed
Hungers and proclivities we have too,
Albeit with woolier bathing suits
And more ridiculous hats. It was the style
To claim this isle for God and society
But few now take an interest in dredging
Through stones for some shards of ceramic
Softened by rain into something different.

The seagulls give birth here, and spread their bones
In far less prudish display than our ghosts.
They say there were storms, kitchens lost to flames,
But those were merely stories we’d required
To justify the ruins, bereft of myth
And usable history, some crags,
Some grass, a dreary beach, some sumac trees …
The ladies pose in dinghies for eternity,
The men still drink gin rickeys to this day,
In a flash of thunder, buckets of rain.
If only I could join them, at least in
A dream, but there’s so little left of them
— No laughter, no ribbons, no ties — ah but
There’s less of me, so it’s somehow enough!

The Superior Hills

Serendipity

     Fog is on the way 

An emaciated gray 

     Across Balboa Bay

All the notions

     Are put on ice 

As the light divides

     From vision

The maritime frames

     Somehow illusion

Boats turning

     A galaxy away 

Agreement About Others

It's the season of suicidal truth-seeking,

Evenings as black as the crows, and the orange flame

Too far away to convince anyone there is

A consequence. Who can look at the line of moon

Amid the distortions of blue? There is no room

To say the stars are true, when so many eyes 

Don't see them as important enough to include.

It contradicts what others know, what they have heard.

There is no point in telling them what to do, for

No one trusts another's eye, or believes what's been learned.

It is what each wants to be right on their islands

That registers, for the trees there are real at least, 

And the hegemon of belief holds them down like

Gulliver under needles, for something once made 

Belief and their being one and the same, a kindness 

Of seeing into them, eyes silent yet fixed in

An authoritative stare, saying "no" so many times

It seems that "yes" must not exist, even as the roots

Break through the soil, and the birds sing themselves closer.

It is only the earth that cares, and some stray 

Solitary souls, for whom what is right matters.

For everyone else, it is a weakness to be

Exploited, by the sneers of the fearful, that can

Overcome even the most permanent of stone.

The Silence of Sunday Night

The scribe makes a sound of crying

— Something left for the ages

No matter what the ink reveals

Over time on the pages.

It hangs in the air

Like the myth of Lemuria 

Or an incident from decades ago

Stuck in the permanent now.

And maybe this sound

Just resembles a cry

In its soft whirring flight

Of ballpoint black ...

And yet it must be;

How else could the words

Be carried away,

Carved right out of life?

Summerlin

 According to legend, the Day of the Dead commemorates the anniversary of the day Atlantis was destroyed.

The fall left behind
Besides the heartbreaking guilt
At who knew
And who wasn't told
A scattering of pyramids

And now, despite the pain of the caul
That veils others' eyes
The pyramids have risen inside,
Knowledge has become
Experienced

The voice that cried in the desert
Grieving, grieving
Has given way, finally,
To the rat-a-tat of crows
Thirsting for water

The rocks that broke in my hands
No longer need to be real
As I struggle forward
Like the blind to the light;
I can see how the screen warps

I No Longer Steal from Nature

Our incomplete history records Al-Ma'arri (973-1057) as one of the first vegans. Here this blind poet from Aleppo helps us commemorate World Vegan Day with enduring truth. (Adapted from Reynold A. Nicholson, 1921).

Religion diseases you, knowledge too.

But in this sound you may hear 

Something true.

There's no justice in eating the fish

From the waters, and no desire in the flesh 

Of creatures slaughtered,

Or the pure milk of mothers 

Whose draught is love for their waking young, 

Not the unconscious human.

And taking eggs from unsuspecting birds, 

Do you hear their grieving of injustice, 

The worst of crimes?

And honey is not a bounty, a gift to someone other

Than the bees who gathered it from fragrant flowers

To keep themselves alive.

I've washed my hands of this; and wish only that I realized

Before my hair turned grey

The way of life!

Haiku

Inside you is the universe

Like a waiting bloom

Still you can't air drum Keith Moon 

The Q Anniversary

It always ends with atonement,
In my case, for believing others evil
For believing what I once believed

When any classroom welcomed me
To pontificate on virtue at will.
Now, of course, I know I must be

Quiet, with life and livelihood imperiled 
For speaking the truth directly
Or at least believing I was free to.

All I can say, by way of apology, is “have pity,”
For what I have learned can’t be wiped away
And what is wrong can’t be so easily turned

With words twisted elegantly. My voice would
Be multitudes, if they let what I'd say exist
Before the cleansing is accomplished.

But still we persist, in amplified silence
That honors the others denials
As it makes us deny them

For the sake of the truth, an island
Where the few who wash on its shores
Talk only of the sea’s treachery.

Why grief that they choose not to think for themselves?
Why anger they are innocent, these murderers?
And why do I come back to their doors, once shut on me

To peer again through the lead of their glass?
What they don’t know only hurts me.
I feel shame four or five times a day

For deeming their errors a sin,
Their ignorance vice,
Their assaults a crime

When their words are just weapons,
Harmless until I care about them.
That I will is nothing to be sorry for, per se,

Despite what the high llamas say
About the traps of compassion,
For it gets me close at least to the human,

That wretched place, where one can see
Reality as a dream,
And call it heaven.

Arizona Highways Scenes

I. 

No Tequila Sunrise

This year

So the old man

In the chair

In front of the Morning Glory

Will not have to carry

Students out of the planter beds

By the Navajo Mission

In a wheelbarrow.

II.

The gold grass of the old 

Potato field is still,

The pinecones fragrant,

Gold frosting on the ponderosas 

Where needles fall through sun

To a blanket of circles.

The mind must slow

To the whispers of the trees

To even see the jays.

III.

The faces let you in

The fat old Chinese bastard

And his friends 

Their heads still hold

In the sky

Nothing surprises them

No matter how low we've fallen.

The saguaros on the other hand

Have thrown up their arms

In a kind of surrender.

They'll give you photos

And give you codes

But what they feel about it

You won't know

It is what it is

So it goes

No word can even stand

In judgement

Although we try to talk it up 

As if this eerieness

Is a passing phase

And the trials of the desert rats

Are merely nothing to speak of,

One quotient of madness

In a day brushed with chaos.

You go into the dust and the spikes

To find the desert's heart

And go farther than you'd ever imagine

You could go

And it only opens up 

When you've given up hope

Of ever finding a home.

Amitabha and the Incidental Perfection of the Chimes

The winds turn paper flags

Surrendering the lotus

To vulgarity

The only peace we'll ever know

The prayer wheels are spun

Into the spiral

Sending the sorrows and virtues

Simultaneously 

Into the valley

That receives what seems an insurmountable 

Amount to let go:

The heart, the mind, the soul

Hands turn with the weight

Of immersion in suffering 

And cannot release

The head to the ground in prayer

Brings the emptiness 

At the world's center

Where everything will begin

At the second prayer

Even the birds start to laugh

From a Bed of Red

Time has dissolved

     in the white grass

     there is no end

             of birds

               or flies

     or snorting ballerina

             javelinas

They stay as permanent

     as stone and sky

             despite the wind

     whispering

             the minutes

And the birds slowly turning

             into songs

High above the rock, trees wave,

      berries are forever waiting,

             branches reaching,

Leaves fill out the chasm

      with the happiness of being,

             the lichen makes love

                            to the rock

Dead sticks caress soft grasses

       and grandmother tree 

             is as a child

      knowing what she's seen

             is but a shadow

                     rippling

          at the edge of evening

A Bird at Lizard Head

The blue bird is blurting

     "don't use your words,

Breathe into the wind

     and let the trees be in you.

Feel how the rock is as hollow

     as a heart,

How it hums 

     your spirit song.

"There is one desert, here,

     in this moment,

In that distance is only pride,

     regret, sorrow --

The white beyond the red's but

     another foreign perspective,

Those things you say

     you want to leave behind."

"The crackle in the branches

     is the buzzing in your ears,

The tree is merely a sphere,

    the grass formed into spirals,

And water spills down the wash 

     from alternate frontiers,

A different red-brick schoolhouse,

     different planks of juniper

"Existing not in other times, 

     further distances,

But in the book -- already written --

     you are reading,

In the clean lines of the wilderness,

     the wound of the trail.

Feel the pull from either side,

     build the cairn."

The Music at Bell Rock

The two walled cities are impervious

To even the most orgonite-enhanced,

Salt room-washed neophyte. For them,

The twisted pines must suffice, 

The rusted charge of the root red trails,

The manzanita, Mormon tea,

Blue winter fat and soapberry ...

The fortresses retain their shapes

Against all metaphors.

And the path of creamy pink boulders

Poured from an ancient forge goes

Wherever it wants to go,

And the walkers become subject

To what it shows them:

Silktassel, crucifixion thorn,

Sumac with the audacity to turn red ...

Yet giant slab faces are submerged in the sand

When they no longer have the capacity to scare

And still they guard a certain area

That humans can feel but remain too far

To pierce its veil, except for, maybe, tonight,

An October at dusk, when the spruce has its skin

Pulled away to the orange brown of the berries

And the pines pose as our primordial fear,

An elixir almost too much to bear ...

The seeker walks the serpentine through fear, 

In the mad desire of belief

To a sun that is already setting, 

And no destination indicated ahead.

Is the thought of a sunset ritual enough 

To call forth the temple from the sand?

There's music from Bell Rock, pouring forth

From the silence, from people who've become,

With only flute and drum, coyotes...

Then the Gaelic fiddle jig begins

Under centuries of stone melting.

It seems we can't reach such realities,

They float in air forever too far away.

But everyone can meet at the Cathedral,

Take our flashlights to the top

To populate the ledges, laughing and singing,

Dancing and drumming, believing in an

Event because there are so many people ...

Impelled by some force to crouch by the moon

Or as close as these monoliths will allow.

Vortex by the River

The river calls the trees into it

To materialize

In the mind's moving lines

Stones underneath in gold

Despite the care taken to be separate

They are inextricably part of the whole

And — trompe de l'oeil — one never knows

If the tree is in the water or the sky

— It could be both, so deep is its green

And in the sheen

Black branches rise

Like arms to be lifted skyward

And braver rocks try the island life

In the oncoming flow

Dry in a world of water

They pop up at distances apart,

Different sizes, colors, dispositions —

But there’s no escape from the whole

Framed by the river 

As part of its murmuring prayer

Even as they stay still as pines

Shards of blue come between 

The long black alder limbs

And their twittering boughs

In the slow migration of leaves 

Free to leap, to disappear into the soil

Of a different color, or to follow the river down

The sun's come over the ridge to mark the wrinkled bark,

Each tree a university of individual expression

In the white and mute spotlight

Then a curve of rapids are mountain tops moving,

A response to a theoretical actual alpine source

Also moving away, down an unquestioning course

The force of an idea is such, such is gravity

And such is the inevitable need to reply, as water does,

Raising its hackled mane as it slides through the sluices

Only to smooth again

Into an undisturbed surface of everything else

Until the next turbid fall into foam

The poplar responds, also, 

To the softening of the sun

With a gold brilliance, a kind of wisdom

Their leaves dance at the wind's hand 

Down to the ground,

Making a sound the cicadas complete

As do the rapids that curl and balance

In a sharing of force,

The power is somewhere else

The leap of white comes 

From a familiar 

Yet unknowable source

Though it seems the leap

Is water's own, willful and spontaneous, 

The eccentric harmonized just as it lifts

Water drips across the stones 

To the stream from someplace else, 

But there is no place 

But this for it, as it folds inside the accumulate,

Where every thought that ever was 

Blends into its perfect expression

The trees and the grasses are mere fans 

Waving along the chasm

As the cheers roll along

Then the river gives way as the sun moves on

To white, the mirrors have turned to light

Observing only the motion, the process

Of thought thinking, 

Ideas being conditioned,

To be reformed at a further bend

The Bird

For Jen

You flew over Thunder Mountain,

        While sleeping below.

As long as love is held

        Wings won't release,

The bird will be silent,

         Sleepers will sleep.

Until all identities peel away

         From chrysalides 

Love will be a gift

         Of the conditional

To bodies still as stones

         In star-webbed night

That wait to be forgiven

         For having to exist,

When all that is created

         Flees the womb

To be the void of bird,

         Bringing thunder

Without a sound, the wordless

         To the song.

On Mother Mountain

The gray humpback whale on my shirt

Gets the animal communicator going

To another griot story with Lakota drum.

It's one on one, the personal relationship,

Not religion's man-made black and white,

The tye-dyed butch from Toronto decried,

"Ah, but there is a choir!" But from my

Perspective it had nothing to offer,

By way of explanation, for this vista;

What is, it appears, cannot be explained

By even the holiest scented robes.

Yet we come here, unreformed, 

For frequencies not to be squandered

But held through the cold of Vail and Detroit,

Every destination we wayfarers will go back to. 

We watch how the pinyon pine branches are peeled

Away into whorls by the vortextual spiral,

Which seems for the moment to be lost and looking for

The confidence of the agave, unselfconsciously

Holding its own curls like a hair-weave from Mr. Ray,

But it sees, divine wind, how we too are peeling back

Our identities, until there is nothing, not even a name,

Left but love, as natural to catch as this breeze.

The energy rolls down the stone like essential water,

Glinting the same, in another sensory wavelength.

The Hopi forehead, high and full of shadows, gives her 

Away, Kachina Mother, her hair held aloft in a bun 

That is part of her quest to separate from the sun, 

To be at one. There are faces everywhere, guarding the sky,

On the adjacent cliffs and distant mounts, faces that

Have seen too much, looks of awe and laughter, sadness 

And surprise, wearing the masks of hawks and lizards

But, despite their hard mein, they have nothing to do, 

For what they would protect can only be sacred

Despite the pull of finer vapors from the deepest densities 

Of beer and pork chops, to this top, uncovered 

Except on our heads. She is impervious still, in her bruised 

Red rock, to the ascent of the white man upon her mane,

Such patience and grace, to feel so much to forgive,

A lot of wearing away, a lot of sorrow endured

In the cool, merciless wind. The suffering of a mother

Knows no bounds. Cairns of temple stones in piles

Around her base, oblivious to the distances

To its sister spires hanging in the mist, in equal silence,

Layers and layers away from this center, that is really 

No center, just a face, seamlessly woven in to the web of faces.

In ruined columns, high rises extend along the Mogollon Rim,

Each chamber an eye, looking out on what we observe.

The bottle blondes in spandex urge me to silence

As they sit cross-legged by the cactus -- but the gap

Between words grows so large so quickly -- and the pine voices 

Start, cacaphonous as any party, a language and reality so strange

It coalesces almost instantly to a cicada frequency in my ears,

What I could regard as lost, a ghost, in the lounge of the vortex

Undertow. The stones that have acquired such heat turn into steps

Toward a pagoda, where buddhas in the guise of monks

In the guise of modern women sit, contemplating the leftover 

Nothingness from the roar of the canyon void.

Stoned from the ions, we murmur small mumbles,

Rockgroking like local reptiles, as tuning fork vibes

Come between our heads and the stone committee.

We all are free, to figure it out for ourselves, to find some

Community no matter how imperfect, the only requirement 

Is that the current cannot end, that the seemingly endless 

Valley will be washed in light forever, the same desire as

Lovers clasping hands. Conclusions seem so small 

In the face of such vast empathy,

Integral lines extending like a rope across the skies.

We hear the actual wings of the crow, as it flies.

Rainbow in a Drop

The colors blend 

          Effortlessly

One into the other.

How little distinction

                        There is

When there is one.

Faces in Sedona

Every cloud a face,

Every blackened smoke tree

Bearded with thick golden hair,

The rust grass that blows like a whisper

To the purple atmosphere.

The tall yellow flower stares down

The prickly pear, the molting 

Mountains, the rainbow skies

Over the pot o gold fields,

Very stern, very dead.

I have left so many lives behind.

I don't recognize who I was.

There is no help for who I am.

The seed I grow could be anyone,

Everyone, whatever is needed

To fold back to the source as a memory,

Of the way I felt by the mimosa tree,

The ponderosa chaparral tones,

The red that remains something more

As it is almost infinitely less.

The mountain cap says "don't mind

The aching beauty of old, piled codes,

There is something that I want to say:

I am whatever father you need, I move only

In your mind, do you see -- it -- crackle?"

Along the burgundy ridge, shadows rest 

In looming thoughts, complete with silence

What is already whole, and so realized

In holding such magnificence,

The steady drip of light does all the work

To explicate the contours of a thought 

Worth keeping, as it fades away.

We do not have such thoughts, except in

Our highest moments, where nothing

Needs to make sense, the light is enough 

And infinity is touched without reaching ...

Only to find the stones hold on, too, 

Against the thought, of having to be that idea,

Trying to ply their form as formlessness, 

As true identity, finally amassed.

A wise old tree stump is missing an eye

But not much else. These are faces you know, 

There is nothing to fear from loved ones, 

Despite the scowl and the silence, 

The stillness when you move closer

And leaves transform into light on black wicks, 

Cactus spikes hold spiderwebs incandescent

As the pines swab with fire the air.

The light is such, the red rocks cool it off

Like blood from the hills to soften the trails,

And indeed there doesn't seem to be a limit 

To how deep the redness goes

As the contrast of sky dissolves.

Even what wasn't red before 

Becomes so, in sympathy.

It becomes too much, so the sun must, finally, 

Take it away, in a blaze of nebular blue, 

As if in a final taunt not to touch 

Our trusty cameras, but to look, simply

To look, unbearable as it is, to look.

Game of Telephone

He tells her he's good somehow 

And she tells her neighbor 

That she's good as well, 

And he explains to the next in the chain 

How he thinks he's worthy for certain ... 

And eventually it gets to me 

But I have no one to talk to but you 

And you are here to deny 

All I know to be right,

As if it's between you and me -- 

So I keep my mouth shut. 

It's easier to feel good, right, worthy 

When I am not questioned 

Even though being questioned 

Has nothing to do with me.

Piscean Overhang

The books are so many sand

     Paintings dispersed

               By a hand

As the Age of Messiahs passes,

     The hero in theory

               Always a cad

                                         In fact.

The good can only be bad,

     Much as it pains

               The martyr inside

Who knows the outside world

               Can't help

                                  To surmise.

All circles fit into the circle.

All colors metamorphize to one.

     The slogans and the flags,

               False maps.

     The stone floor contains

               Many faces

                                    Not even trapped.

Sunday Afternoon at Bolsa Chica

The fish bubbles, pelicans dive
     —A form of communication,

An energy exchange, something retained;
     Fish jumps for joy, birds dive for play,
And the river swallows it whole,

     Into its endless lines of code,

Where the learning goes on, in the shadows

     Of dim worlds and relations scarcely imagined.

The cormorant slips below the surface, seemingly 
     Non-existent until it reappears
Like some sporadic comet crown,
     Magnificent in the sun.

Soon the shorebirds will relieve them,
     Long bills exploring the mud flats

With the vengeance of a sports nerd
     Poring over Elias long-dried stats.

Two ripples and a lift on takeoff. A laconic
     Glide and two brisk wingsnaps back.

The feast in between is of looking,
     Eyes bird-wide, not the elusive
Wait of decoys, nor the sudden plunge to crab,

     Which is inexplicable as effect,
One might as well say

     They were merely hungry.

The photographers are watching as well, learning

     To eye as the birds,

But with a different moment to capture, when 

     The lenses are unwrapped, 

Tripods turned tight, just like talons reaching down 

     Into the darkness.

Their equipment is of different sizes, for different

     Purposes, just like these birds—

Those who wrangle with the shoreline, and those who
     Use each inch of sky to land their point.

Some gape at prey, while others say

     "It is too far away."

One never knows what goes into these strategies,
     Except that decisions are made

In the wave of the doing, guided

     By a higher right:

The crisply timed lift, the perfect aperture turn,
     The angle and frame smoothly executed.

They wait on what the flow will deliver,

     Cooper's hawk or sleeping duck.

One of them waits for the perfect shot,

     That can live beyond the clock

That won't stop, but can be stilled if he can

     Be still long enough 

To know the difference between vying and sharing. 

     It's hard for the others sometimes to tell,

The line between comrade and competitor is known

     Only to the combatants, not the dilettantes

With smaller lenses, the Sunday painters of the scene, 

     Who come for a day away from what they know

And are expected to learn, who take it in

     As only watching

The egrets lope along the salt grass,

     Awkward before the entire outside world

That prompts them to rattle one's horn at another 

     Or stride away in the peaceable mud,

To charm the snakes with their hypnotic gait

     Or flap their capes at the others in sport,

To follow or strike out on its own, spread its long

     And elegant wingspan of breathtaking white.

     

It's but another day of learning, how it feels to be

     A flash of light on the deep, reflective blue.

The lessons are something important to retain 

     Even though they're immediately forgotten, 

Something permanent, although unrecoverable

     In another cycle of sun.

The world will appear the same, tomorrow,

     Though everything will be new, irrevocable.

Sunset at Bolsa Chica

The grebe flies without judgment 

     Of itself, and thus, of others.

The cordgrass is submerged

     But sea lavender extends in red

Along the archipelagos of the wetlands 

     As the endless estuary 

Rolls in its radio waves to sway

     The mulefat willows

And the sun descends its mirror 

     On the water within

The shoals where clapper rawls and avocels, 

     Least terns, sanderlings and curlews roost.

On the dunes, tarplant and primrose spill their nets

     And the goldenbush is in flower,

Salt cedar and pickleweed thrive, with the pervasive

     Coastal sage in tangled tufts,

And on the bluffs, buckwheat and beach bur,

     Woolly heads and witches hair cling to life,

Coyote bush full of creamy fuzz gesticulating wildly.

      Today's miracle is in progress now before us.

The brush strokes of cloud turn pink.

      Saddleback rises in violet.

A crane hides in the deepening green,

     Turning blue as the water

As colors overwhelm the oil jennies plunging,

     The headlights streaming, shirts flying,

Copters circling, masks passing. Blue clouds 

     Swag on one side as the sun squeezes through 

The purple moment. Even the two pelican islands

     Are indigo in a vast pink field.

The waters are like blood beneath the sprouts in shadow.

     The grebe's white wings lift into the night,

As unaware as we are that the stripes of nobility 

      We can't see in ourselves 

Are stilled in streaks across the sky, holding

      To a more heroic hue, richer than any red.

Playing Hooky at Having to Annoy People

Most of what people say is bullshit anyway,

But the cheaper the talk, the better, as long as it's cold,

Held out like a tongue-tied swizzle-stick 

As the story finds its own twists naturally,

No one needed to actually listen, which no one

Wants to actually do, as they talk to the smiling wall.

There are many unique timbres on the instruments,

Like an orchestra of sorts, that sounds, at a certain distance

Like song, melodies that come back incessantly 

To the root, harmonious cackles where there would be

Agreement on the details, and the beat of pleas 

As if the voice could live, if only it was heard. 

But it is not to be.

The train of voices cannot stop at any station.

But anything is better than sending it out into the ethosphere 

Like an empty bottle on the water.

In the Relocation Camp

No one can argue

With the doctrine of love.

If the decision is made

To break up the band

For whatever sadistic

Or self-destructive reason,

What we need 

                             Is the one who will say

"Ah, everything is perfect, finally, now."

If there's a black hole somewhere

                                                               It could 

Suck us all in.

Better to send our best

To show them how it's done.

The Exchange

Piper birds whirr on the soft mind of earth 

As it pours incessant tide on the shore

Translucent as batter, with openings for breath

In the smooth finish wrought out of brows rough

With thought, each one sealed with a bolt of lace.

Such a long way have the sun and moon contended

On this rolling sphere of contemplation,

Tossing ideas like ships here and there,

Trying to keep them on course, their strategems,

That divide into broad, brilliant lines.

The gulls glide by, they are somewhere between

Watching and being a part. The sounds they make

Are returns of what is inferred in the roar.

Aroused gusts rub the belly of the sea,

Where scintillate light pulsates to be received.

Nothing dies in the absence of what replies.

The sun runs right through the glowing bathers.

The umbrellas are scruffed by the wind.

The girls in the surf with the pink hula hoops 

Are drawing men's eyes in like sirens.

Self-Censorship Blues

I don't know shit about Juneteenth
Or the 20 & back surgeries by the moon team,
For the flows and beats from underneath
Turned millennial boy into a thief 
Robbing from the hood to pay it back to the chief
Who ruled before the diaspora's
Promise of sum more for the poor ...

The epistrophies of history,
What was all that for,

The incense and sentience, 

The encores of war?
We're taking down the Babylon now
To the core;

Nothing is as it was before ...

How long have the actresses been male?
The music industry built to make jails?
We see teams kneel to deities
Not the game and its priestly bookies,

And the prostitute pols at the trough
Fear news of more appalling payoff.

And the CEOs are DOA
As their blood supply has dried
And things they've done lie
Just inside the known.
The cover-the-earth lid has been blown
Like tunnel manholes thrown ... 

So they go with an election infection,
Slice each section by objection,
Perfect projections
With ejections of protection
And injection correction ...

They ask for the mask
As they distance resistance,
Call your forced silence tolerance,

Turn every fake to a mistake ...

They'll untie any quick-dry lie
To pack on ice the unhackable fact

Of the bloodstream scheme,
What seems like screams
Too extreme to mainstream ...

As the warm slaves are freed from their cages,
The red shoe secret of the ages ...

They're blind, deformed and nude,
Begging to die when they arrive in light,
The ones who were the food,

The blood supply, rescued,
The subdued multitude

In servitude of solitude
By orders of magnitude ...

Don't heap hate on the deep state
And their dim opinion minions,
Or call for the fall of the KaBa'al

All but invisible but for jackpot robots

To potshot free thought,
Just watch the movie mystery

As they disembody the illuminati
One milk carton child at a time ...

Kids in ship containers,
In bases underground,
In rancid cloning centers,
In temple hunt and found,
In child protective service,
With the Red Cross and the nuns,
With stage moms who are oblivious,
Run with drugs and guns,
In runaway runway agencies,
On unattended swings,
In dream internship vacancies,
In pederasty rings ...

It's all a hivite honeycomb
To archive adrenochrome.
They eat children.

The world that you used to know

Existed precisely for that.

Tragedy at Pisa and Other Myths

                          lingue leggere is mumbled

In the televised entertainment.

          The palimpsest always fades in the sun.

                          But now the people notice

How the past has changed, that it once

                          Was something different.

It seems that we are changing

           But how could that be?

The hills have buried everything

                          But memories,

           The wars have gone to seed

In thickest grass

            That waves in unison

                          Like scythes of cavalry 

And sings a few words only

     Of Gods no longer believed

And heroes at the end of their stories,

            Some anecdote to hum

                          Inside the villages 

To help them bear the present 

     Of the green waste harvest,

            Old toys disposed discreetly,

                          The sweet potato roots

And what to do with them.

     The histories are forgotten 

To make way for other histories

                          Yet unknown

From more distant rings of creation

      You hadn't known your part in,

Where tiger-headed bipeds merge with your mind

              And giant spider eyes

                          Are overcome with feeling

And philosopher reptiles think your thoughts away.

      They all have myths and languages

              Crying to become the same

As what you're learning

      Of your divided self, part earthly,

                          Part divine,

      No way to choose between,

But a kind of reckless faith,

               Not knowing

      As the road to finding out.

Further Diversions for the Connoisseurs

I.

They are as gnats, these fantasies,

Weaving and circling in implicate paths,

Never quite breaking from the real

That holds them to float, in suspension 

And motion, something unobservable 

To observe, unreachable to claw after,

Far from the hotel morning aperitifs

In Marrakech or, say, Bologna,

The gifts of the road, the sun on the porch 

The only light exhaustion affords, those 

Are only implied. It's the force of the sun

Through fingers and a mind that is cottoned 

Like candy, what appears, in other words,

Not what is, the light, not the bearer of light,

But it is, the bearer only, we create ...

II.

Out of the creation. There is only

The creation, the form labeled illusion,

That is real, so the actual person,

The separate creator, becomes imprisoned 

In who I am, or, rather, want to be,

The skin I wish to shed, as pelt, or scalp

To prove, in how I felt about another's

Work, that I am ... worthy, or complete,

Or that I fit into an interesting world, 

Not the one we both inhabit, where vapors

Bleed from other rooms, the beats

Of central and essential drummers

After truth and beauty ... We are somehow them

In hearing it so, yet so apart we have to

Draw their essences back to still their sound.

III.

We have to wear their colors and their hair 

In some invisible approximation 

That will bend, as phantom individuals,

To a larger drummer, so conform to

The one who drums, the one who takes on

A life of its own, as simulacrum, Frankendrum

But kind enough to let the voices that are,

After all, distinct, speak, for the most part,

With only a slight revision required,

A part of the individual lives

Must be erased, to let the story play

And make room, after all, for the all.

We are one. Once we believe in that lie

All deceptions are available, and

Even the bare individual must yield.

IV.

He must be reformed to the invisible, 

The illusions that form co-creates.

One is only as good as ... what one makes,

What one is turned into, baked in the heat

Of desire and will to overcome another

For the beauty they have left behind.

The space within the acoustical void

Is too much more filled with echo than stuff

To hum on its own, without an ear

To own its moment, momentarily --

And the residue bleeds through 

The echoing rooms of the brain,

Where the dust of old libraries pullullate 

In golden light: gathered facts, names like

Talismans, ideas and images that cling.

V.

They need some place to go, where they can

Commune among themselves, and interact

Without need of our organizing minds

Sweeping up the notes of the melody 

As it weaves and circles, like so much dust

In and out of place, to sift, endlessly

And return to the same location

On the disc, in the archives of the sounds,

Cataloged by circumspect collectors

Of the original, lost, and thus preserved,

As a value, a vinyl

Itself. For, in fact, we never left

Our childhood, our imaginary friends

Of invasive Martian vines, pre-pubescent 

Gumshoes, coyotes in cowboy hats ...

VI.

The spinning wheel of karma was always on

To be lost in, platters of beat-itudes 

That never seemed to begin or end,

Only seemed to. One needs to be

Rescued from the past, by being immersed 

In the radiant essence of what had been lost,

An impossibility that could only be

Navigated by this monstrosity

Of implied wires and freeze-dried sparks,

The imaginary creator trapped

In the half-life of what was once created,

That exists now only as a virus

Accepted by the mind as part of itself,

To multiply inside the host as something else,

Growing larger as its possibility shrinks.

Wallace Stevens and the Corporation

In honor of the 141st birthday of Wallace Stevens today, I've pulled from deep storage an exchange circa 1997(?) on a long-extinct "Wallace Stevens Society" list-serve, where I first tried to write about this strange insurance lawyer-poet. Who and what I was responding to after my bold introduction have not been preserved. 

Hi! (as Stevens once wrote) - a garland of elephant ears and some perambulating zithers to all you brave, invisible others who constitute the loyal e-fandom of Wallace Stevens (hellohellohellohellohello).

What I bring to this dialogue (or is it soliloquy?) is the fact that I, like Stevens and perhaps unlike most of you, am a denizen of Corporate America. As such, I have become very interested in the way the “corporate mentality” permeates his work. I am not referring here to “Galled Justicia trained to poise the tables of the law” or those other rare allusions to the work world in his poems. I’m talking about the way a corporation “thinks.”

There is an organic “being” of a corporation that operates and makes decisions independently of the individuals who constitute it. For example, a corporate President or CEO rarely is allowed to make a decision, his or her role is to demand a consensus that has been filtered up through many channels, all of whom have been careful to couch their individual leanings in what is perceived to be the interests of the collective. It could be argued that this consensus forms itself out of the interest the corporation itself expresses, but, whether or not that is the case, it is pointless to object to this consensus once arrived at, for the President or for anyone involved in the process; the consensus has become the Truth.

It is also almost always False, in that this decision-making dynamic has completely smoothed away the ideas of individuals who are closest to a particular area and so have the most thoughtful approaches to a problem - these “opinions” are inevitably filtered out because they cannot be adequately communicated to others who are not at the same vantage point and the depth of feeling behind them cannot be allowed to be expressed. And this slow process whereby the edges of the self are destroyed by being unperceived in the collective whole is, I think, at the heart of Stevens.

This tension informs his anxiety over why we can’t perceive a flower, a work of art, another human being or God except within the cage of our own mind; after all, we define ourselves as a necessary part of a functioning being, yet we find that entity wholly unintelligible and distant even as we live within it. And so the world becomes a plaything to our isolated imaginations, except that the bottom line always shows the imagination to be a lie, however true it may appear.

The barren world that Stevens proposed bears an eerie resemblance to the business world, where all manner of fantasies, dreams and spiritual longings are allowed to exist but disappear at the final moment when “reality” takes over. Stevens’ work can be summarized, in fact, by the classic corporate cliché: “Perception becomes reality.”

My question to the inhabitants of this hive of a different order (hellohellohellohellohello) is: where can I go to further explore this? I’d like to know who else is looking at the link between corporate consciousness and that particular Stevensian angle on life. Does anyone want to delve in particular verses along these lines?

To Prof. Suberchicot-

Thank you for your gracious response. I wholeheartedly agree that Stevens is all about the dark side of the Emersonian eye - your cite of Hopkins’s self destroyed as his perception is destroyed being singularly apt. Certainly, the “why me/who me” dynamic in Stevens is as old as the lyric, and as old as religious experience itself. Stevens is properly related to a peculiarly American romanticism, which you identify, I think, as a stoicism towards the forces of history.

Still, I wonder if Stevens would ever, like Emerson or Hopkins, acknowledge his perception flowing out to the unities along with the rest of his “self” - it “sticks,” - like philosophy before breakfast - “to the eye.” It is this facet - of perception held back - unmoored - that prompts such Stevensian concerns as whether viewing a rose in his own “especial eye” would “muff the mistress for the maid” or of singers singing “beyond the genius of the sea.” And that is what, to me, makes Stevens so difficult to figure - imagination to him becomes a hollow-bored instrument of truth-making, yet it is displaced from the truth - much as a corporate “cog” would be oriented towards fealty to the corporate interest but would also be utterly alienated from it (and this, too, sounds like Hopkins, who also had a problematic relationship to his “career.”) Stevens’ spiritual isolation owes at least as much, I agree, to a pragmatic “Yankee” reticence as to the corporate experience, and perhaps both are symptoms of the American ethos toward art, ideas and spiritual longings - that they are meaningless unless measurable - by dollars, or number of converts, etc.

Stevens, more so than most American artists, seemed to have been torn by the twin mistresses of art and commerce, and he seemed to divide the difference by taking some sort of dandyish responsibility for art, as if by collecting it or binding it in gold leaf or justifying its uselessness in weighty philosophical terms he could protect it from the blind eye of commercial interest. That he was himself a representative of that commercial interest may explain those actions as over-compensating; it’s interesting that Stevens only published poems written while in a corporate environment, and in fact he was deathly afraid of leaving it, even to visit Paris or build his own theory of Poetry at Harvard. He took pains, in fact, to separate himself from the community of artists, even as he viewed himself as an aesthete of avant-garde art. Thoughts?

Roger-

Thanks for your thoughtful response. You make a number of sensible and compelling arguments. I agree that there is no easy answer with such a hidden and inscrutable figure as Stevens. I didn’t mean to suggest that being in a corporation “drove” Stevens to write, or made him into a different person than he was, only that it shaped his experience, and lent a unique quality to his poems. Specifically, I believe the disparity between a collegial “go-along to get-along” environment and Stevens’ extreme isolation (from business associates, other artists and even his family) fueled, in part, his need for the freedom of “imagination” and gave him the painful insight into a ”reality” stripped of illusion.

How do we account for someone who dealt by day in the nether world of surety insurance claims, which is all about reading into the strictest form of contracts and knowing by numbers and statutes when to go to court and when to settle, and by night wrote with authority about Pompei before the volcano and soldiers waiting to die and the sunset on Chinese mountaintops? Why did this gap between “reality” and “imagination” only grow wider the older Stevens got? Why is there literally nothing about his working life in his poems, as opposed to, say, Williams, who used his pediatric practice as a continuous and direct source of inspiration?

Corporate life is not an unfulfilling and dreary existence, but it does not by definition allow for much independence or autonomy (and I would argue that applies to VP’s even more than for lower-placed workers!). Stevens’ later letters have a sense of enforced discretion about mixing poetry and work, as if he felt his career would be threatened in some way if he was “found out” as a poet. Compare this to Charles Ives, another artist-insurance executive, who owned his own business and actually acted as if he did not see a contradiction between his work and art: he wrote jingles to advertise his company, quoted Emerson and other “positive thinkers” to motivate his sales force, and saw his gift of writing creatively as his primary value to the business.

In a letter, Stevens comments how a businessman’s efforts are continually criticized and reshaped to fit the needs of the business and “one doesn’t think anything of it,” whereas artists seem to take the slightest criticism as a sign of betrayal. I read, I guess, more sadness and resignation into this than you may. (I think of him, after his cancer surgery, rushing back to the office, test-tubes sticking out, so they wouldn’t take his absence as an excuse to force a 75-year-old man to retire).

More than all that, I don’t believe literary antecedents such as Santayana (or Goethe, Nietzsche, Shelley, Pater, the Vagabond poets, the Chinese translations of Byner, etc.) prefigure the unique Stevensian perspective, at least in the same way that, say, Baudelaire cleared the way for Eliot or Shakespeare was the framework for Freud’s thinking. Stevens remains unique, and I think in part that’s because being a poet in the corporate world to him was like exile to Dante, it forced him to confront the fantasy at the root of his romantic self-image.

Roger et al (&Kudos to Tom for asking what has all this to do with the price of tea in Ceylon) -

You write about "reality and imagination being interrelated, and usually inseparable except for short, rather artificial moments...but he [Stevens] predominately treats them as interrelated and inseparable: 'eternal observer - man' combines subject and observer." I wholly agree that reality and imagination for Stevens are inseparable, but I differ on why that is so.

You quote Stevens as follows: "reality changes into the imagination (under one's very eyes) as one experiences it..." I do not read this to mean reality and imagination are separate realms that man the observer brings together, but that imagination inevitably replaces reality. I would argue that the brief moments of misalignment between the two realms are what Stevens' poetry is all about: the sudden flash of poetic awareness that the way one's perception constructs the world is entirely self-contained and thus "false." At the same time, "there is no other" world, only eternal observer man. I cannot read the vast majority of Stevens' poems without sensing the poignant gap between an imagined world where everything has meaning and value and a "real" one that feeds the imaginative one but is empty itself of any meaning we can perceive. In other words, we have only imagination to guide us.

The quote from Tom's post seems yet another reiteration of this central theme: "The pungent oranges and bright, green wings" are the sensuous pleasures of life enhanced by the perceiving eye, but they "Seem things in some procession of the dead," because their true essence is far away, hidden, to the observer. They, to the observer, are "Winding across wide water, without sound," wide water being something like the ocean that opens up to infinity and seems to connect everything but cannot be understood. "The day," itself "is like wide water, without sound, / Stilled for the passion of her dreaming feet." The ocean is keep at bay, silent, meaningless, so that the observer can build feeling through her imaginings, her dreams, "Over the seas, to silent Palestine," and imagine Palestine, the central Western myth, as a place of transcendent meaning, even though it is only an edifice, a "Dominion of the blood and sepulchre," the "all-too-human" court or repository of our religious yearnings.

Similarly:

Perhaps "We live in an old chaos of the sun," a seemingly random and meaningless existence, "Or old dependency of day and night," or we may be tied to what seems, the seasons and days, "Or island solitude, unsponsored, free," but we lively equally in our dreams, unmoored to the world that sponsors us. One cannot really say whether we are dependent on or independent from "reality": the unknowable secret is "Of that wide water, inescapable."

I don't know whether this is too confusing or too obvious, but it's boring either way, so I thank you for getting this far. It's a feeling, not a "thesis," and I hope I can inspire some more thoughts from y'all, for I'm amused by how Stevensian this little dialogue has become.

I think of this as essentially Eastern mysticism, the finding of God within oneself, within the imaginative reshaping of one's experience. How such a vision can arise in the context of Pennsylvania Lutheranism and fin de siecle aesthetic philosophy and surety insurance is like a koan we are all collectively trying to unravel, but I find it interesting how Stevensian our grappling is - we are both reading different things into the same materials and completing a picture our minds compel. Yet the reality remains as hermetic as Stevens left it.

Reliquary

October comes like a ghost.

The wind kicks up, leaves depart,

Fires are still in the air.

A harvest of time, disguised

As wine too bitter

To drink or refuse.

Yet forget we must, all the shame

Mistakes burned in us, the griefs

We acquired on the way.

What is this flame in the moon?

To pull us like children to the cold,

Empty enough for our swords.

A Beached Moon

The conflict never ceases — 

The waves

Boiling north with the rip

Gallop on diamond light,

Repulsing, convulsive,

Ruffled manes melting

To spray.

They refuse each resolution 

But the skid on glass,

The collapse to white,

The soothing lilac blue

Still as the sun

Pushing down the day

In turbid rouge.

There are figures to greet them,

Indifferent surfer girls

Veiled in the haze like islands

Bruised and distant, who stare

Below, beyond, ahead for what they

Haven't seen yet, as the wet light

Swallows their edges.

Sunset falls like gasoline.

An entire summer spreads across the sky.

A barely perceptible purple winter 

Quivers like lard on the other side,

Giving nothing away.

There are crickets

As the lightbulbs take the night.

Secrets of the Valley

In my dream you threw a Mexican hat

Down on our sand, and danced, if not

For me, at least alluringly,

Like you cared enough to cast me

In your spell. In reality, you had the house

And an ex and a boarder with a retriever

Who left the TV on all night 

While you drank pinot noir in total darkness

When the desert crackled outside — 

Your makeup showed her face

In the invasions of moon through your window

As you shared dark chocolate and darker eyes

And a spacious enough couch for the biggest ideas

And a voice that wanted to believe all my lies.

But the cactus outside was inside too,

In the turquoise pastels and copper fires 

Of your refuge, as you held me

The only way you knew how, at a distance,

But not the one beyond the housing tracts,

Where not even jackrabbits can hide

And all things blow into puncturing traps.

All of my friends soon ran for the hills

And gas log fires, cats in windowsills

And pools, as if this holiday would last

And there was no such thing as Sun Ra 

Or psilocybin in the Third Mesa red.

The desert woman warned I was a fool

To look back, like Lot, for a wife.

The Stupas at Ku Tho Daw

The words of the books are like gibberish, 

Irrelevant to even the Singha, who no longer

Lose their fleshly robes for reading the slabs.

Most still can't, whether local mendicant

Or obscure tourist, who, as much as she parses

Like Jesus, cannot revive its ancient tongue.

But the words still have to be left in these crypts

White in the sun, these endless marble tombs

Where no one dares to peer at the scrolls.

The sacred is only so if untouched by the mind

That can’t hear the harmony from the other room,

For the pure song needs to keep voices separate.

The books turn blue as the Mandalay night descends,

So much beauty there, in the solitude

As if the words continue to pull and accrue

The odours of the hillside, the bells along the town,

The silence of the desolate pilgrims,

As if a new page is turned, by pristine hand.

Forgiving the Original

There's everything outside of myself  

(The universe)

And myself 

(The universe),

And a dance

To express oneself

To the other,

To express, that is,

The other

As oneself

So to sense in the other 

Oneself, as the wholly foreign characters

In the completely unbelievable play

Pull out the soul of what you are 

In catharsis and tears.

It was me and her,

Her with her letter,

A she I never met

Except in the letter,

That changed me and her.

I became

What I am

Or was destined to be,

To dance 

With a ghost.

It was all 

I wanted to do,

And her, 

Far away, 

Not watching.

Autumn on the Vines

The passion fruit flower has decided
To grace us with its sadness today,
As its vine, moving like garland crowns
Around the down spouts, turns burgundy
In the early moon afternoons.

The hibiscus, by contrast, feels
It has waited behind the leaves
Long enough, it was time
For a party, of like-minded large
Orange bells ringing.

The grasses do not wish to move,
They want not to have to
Think through the day,
But to rest on their laurels
Of ephemera: white blossom. 

A giant butterfly does all the heavy
Lifting, communicating something
Incommunicable, as it is communicated
Through, above the shoots, above 
The roof and away.

Tomatoes are close to graduation from the vine,
Peppers and potatoes are turned purple,
The calla lily flowers have taken on
A character of grief, as the elephant ears

Stretch for the last of the sun.

Ah, the things that are done
To exist — the twists, the shifts,
The contortions;
The earth so radiant 
Is never quite enough.

Après le Deleuze

“Living in semblance as goal,” so “Nietzsche” said,

To find the true, one must use, says “Deleuze,”
Division, simulacra as excuse
For difference, to quiet the aching head
Against the agonies of the agora,
Its milieu of immanence,
The paid mage of the God on earth
Versus the amateur, the lover of wisdom,
Who borrows it to grind an axe
That might be peddled as wisdom, friend,
The philo-soph, a mark of distinction,
That shows the desire for what is not
Possessed. 

                    Another exercise in raw power,
Like shucking a mussel, as claimant
In the competition for consensus,
Where the sovereign is dealt injustice
And the unity is polluted, an experience
Where the true can not be conceived,
Even for Socrates, where there must be
An Ideal to be believed, where the sovereign
And unity are one,

          
                                  Because they are,
The universe exists in every cell, we just can’t
Conjure it up that way, the discus takes
Too many different trajectories
Depending on the individual will of specific
Arms. “The immanent must be transcendent,”
Not the holy eyes of flies, but the truth that can’t
Alight on warring mortals, so the higher
Crier would have you turn your attentions for,
A probative force in the unmediated res.

                                                                    Thus 

All things of mind turn to myth, for there is
Never mediation, no probative force
In the war between sensory forms —
All things are pretenders to the throne
Of theoretical, rhetorical ideal.
The simulacra, the impure, the thoughtless
Repetition, becomes a demon clone
In the proximity of bartered grain and poverty.
How one wishes for a son just like the father
For the bride, instead of the foreign
Intruder on the sovereign, the alien
That can never pass the test of verity,
The counterfeit Sophist, who insinuates
What he is and is not everywhere,
Contradicting all attempts to claim him
As he makes unfounded claims on everything,
Enough to make even Plato feel temporarily
Like Ulysses, cursing the nest of selfish suitors
Who must be avenged in the name of truth!

Their claims must be judged — false — in order to
Ostracize; nature must be deemed — wrong — in order
To justify, the immanence must be turned transcendent
In order to be corrupted, in order for the order
To be eluded, as being perverted
Away from ideal — desired — truth. Thus the fallen man,
Thus the senses are imprisoned, thus the lucidity
Of evil.

                So much will is hinged on being right,
The philosophers agree, however careful they are
To word their thoughts as questions impossible
To answer. Without truth, modernity regrets
To be informed, there is only difference,
Thus, c’est ca, there is no truth.
But how else could we have difference?!?
“Behind difference,” he bravely concludes,
“There is nothing,” as if there needs to be
Anything at all. Only those unpurified
In the fires of the agora would see
Any need for deeper meaning, for only those
Would see how their power has been corrupted
And how they were wronged because of it,
And how, because of it, they know what wrong is. 

 
                          Thus all critiques concern problems,
Not the solutions that a joyous heart pours forth
Across the tabula rasa of the philosopher’s stone,
And thus identity is born from the hearth fires
As difference; it cannot know itself
Except in contrast, like a photographic shadow,
As it cannot stay intact once it is recognized.
The mask unmasks to another mask, as the onion
Skin peels back, to endless displacement,
Unlimited divergence in the search for the abyss
That mediates.

                         Thus identities come to resemble
Each other, as “optical effects,” whose only soul
Is novelty. They actualize what they are, to be whatever ideas
They are allowed to be, what they themselves allow
To stay sovereign and intact above the black
Hole of form, where consequences lack consciousness.
They are only something other, as the witness
Who has given away all power in the name of it
Gains strength in being alone, for the sovereign
And the unity, it has finally learned, are one.

Bluster of the Little a

Once we were content to spit on each other

And laugh, and throw the word "asshole" around
Like it meant what it said. But the towel snaps
Usually rolled off of us like drops
Because no one knew anyone then
And even the game was too primitive
To ever say anyone had won.

Soon we moved into identical homes,
With identical women, and jobs we pretended
— Unlike the first two — to be the same.

We learned there was nothing to win,
No wild game inside the parks, so we sat
On our sofas and did some calculations,
Pulling more victories from thin air,
To share with a few, special people
Who didn't seem to understand or care.

Now we laugh when the boys yell we will die soon,
And we've started to wonder why we never
Learned to surf, and only wrote letters home
Under duress, and looked to get out of
Any homework that was assigned. Was there
Something more important than experiencing life?

The dribbling ball, the taunt at one's weakness,
It all kind of disappeared in shame.

There's enough polarity today to sail a yacht.

What a world we live in, where any claims
To consciousness can be drowned with
"It's stupid ... lame ... bullshit ... I don't care."

And you wait for something that they care about

To seep like anti-freeze from their chiseled,
Getting-their-dick-sucked mouth, but it's always
Something else, a more elaborate insult
In a longer, heart-rending diatribe
Lacking any argument or story
But full of a point that they are right,
Always they are right, and the wrong must wait
To respond until they've safely moved away.

For the wind needs to blow
And the trees need to kill
Some of their own branches
And drop too many seeds
So the wind can feel useful.

The Skip in the Groove, and the Nickel

There is no truth,

Just images pulling away.

The mind is not The mind,

No matter what the archons say.

Only light can hold the light

In the heart space.

If the only reality is your own,

Why should you care that there are others?

The hologram thinks what you're thinking

And delivers what thought created,

Like "Jimi Hendrix is 

Morgan Freeman"

And "JFK is not 

Even dead"

And it's all to see how deep you will go

Inside the as-above, so-below honeycomb

Of your spacious, endless globe of a head.

The nothingness you fear

Is a needing for things to be real,

As if the continual spring 

Of fanciful imagination

Taught you nothing

About what is.

Shards in Broken Time

1.

The little boy lost is my guide,

     The happy one

                    From the orphanage 

     Who misplaced — again — his ID

And fell outside

                    My custody,

A baby — despite everything.

2.

My "dense involvement"

          Is the headline 

     But can I receive

The gift of the chamomile 

     Placed before me

          In a crystal vase?

3.

The large I sees

     What the small I perceives

                      Closer to the ground —

Distinct perspectives 

     Rippling to the infinite.

The Layers of Distance

I stride the waves of the poem,

Its ebullient froth,

Slammed by the cross-swirl,

The punch it packs 

In the plexus I lack,

What I haven't looked through

The darkness yet 

To detect.

My feet lift from the sand 

And currents carry 

Where there's no center anywhere,

Just the turbulence of forces turning

On themselves

In a kind of longing,

Letting the suppressed

Through open eyes.

The sonar of the gulls

And whistles of the lifeguard 

Blend as one long warning

Of the lure

Of endless surf

And inexplicable currents

And a constant gasp at meaning 

As vision is immersed.

Along the shining crest

That arches up so firmly

To collapse,

Distant shadows 

Of the riders

Slicing lines

Across the swells,

The naturals

Who cannot think of what it is

Or imagine what could be,

They only know that to get from

Point A to point B

Requires a certain stupid bravery,

A faith despite the roar

In their delivery,

Though they dissolve as well 

In foam

Until another pipeline forms

To carve themselves and their boards

Inside the frieze of time.

An Argosy of Misreading

The first thing that they teach at university

Is how deadly a passion for poems and what they mean

Can be, for mere poesy can only offer up

What the storyline will allow,

What takes the young ones out of the darkness 

Through whatever guile or treachery

Is available — The poem itself is but a vehicle 

That can be what it is on its own time,

When silence is the compensating gift.

The scholars wrap the poems inside their envelopes

That no students risk their moistened lips to seal.

The poets are superstitious. They think to touch

The stream as it glistens would change the course

Of rivers or make the sun slant to the east.

They could be shown as fools in keeping quiet for so long.

But those who would won't touch the stream

Because it's wet and goes a thousand directions

Right through one's fingers. And so there's nothing, really,

To say on what it is, and why it moves

To give anyone room to make improvements.

The scholars wrap the poems inside their envelopes

That students have no moisture left to seal.

It stands imperfectly eternal now, perpetually unwatched.

The thought of its gurgle is enough

To haunt the lips of wayward children

Through the silence they need, like seeds, to grow in.

Maybe, as the decades peel away, they'll discover

Smudge-marred lines and not remember what they meant,

What they never knew, but know somehow, now

They missed, in the days that have slipped through, gone,

So a grief matches up — oblique — with that of the poem.